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Elgin Conversation Salon creates chat room without
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Co-host Robin Slater chimes into the conversation during one of the Saturday night discussions Slater and Kathy Hamill host each month at their Elgin home. |
 Photo by Christopher Hankins/Daily Herald |
Articles about our conversation salons
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Lounging on a sea of pillows and tie-dyed beanbags, a tall man with spectacles stretches his legs, uncrosses his arms and frankly states what he dare not advertise to fellow techies at work. He cross-dresses. Or used to, the 53-year-old man says with a grin, before his fondness for high heels, dresses and makeup forced his hand and he had to decide whether to keep dressing like a woman or stay married to one. He opted for the latter. He ditched his female get-up on eBay, he says, but the foray into womanhood helped him better answer that timeless question that haunts many of us: Who am I? Answers fly around the den in the west Elgin home of Kathy Hamill and Robin Slater, who host the Elgin Conversation Salon, a discussion group that draws 30-, 40- and 50-somethings from all corners of the Northwest suburbs. The repartee quickens as the hour crawls deeper into Saturday night.
Men and women, college professors and high school dropouts, teens and vintage hippies congregate in two bead-strewn, pillow-covered rooms to think, banter, hear and be heard - by strangers who scatter when talk quiets and rarely cross paths until it resumes the next month. In their face-to-face chats lies a safety that breeds honesty, sociologists say, a safety that gives free rein to curiosity. And a safety that exists with a face, a name and a handshake - unlike the anonymity of Internet chat rooms. "I love the freedom to go ahead and talk about anything," said Terry Hall, an accountant from Gurnee and frequenter of the Elgin conversations. "In my regular life, I don't want to offend anyone. This is a very easy place to say what you want to say. You don't feel vulnerable when you're here." Perhaps sensing that, a high school teacher wonders aloud what she might do were a shooting to occur in her building as it did in Colorado's Columbine High five years ago. "I don't know if I'm a hero or a coward," she said quietly. A man with a ponytail and serious eyes who sits nearby describes his evolution from a teen eager to enlist and be all he could be in Vietnam to an anti-war protester, vehement in his opposition to the conflict. Laughter erupts when a woman, a first-timer, confesses to becoming someone she swore she'd never be: a middle-aged lady with dyed hair. Heroism, moral conflict, cross-dressing and hair-coloring - another lively night at the Elgin Conversation Salon. Such banter has packed Hamill and Slater's home for the better part of six years, drawing suburbanites from Arlington Heights to Crystal Lake, from DeKalb to Gurnee. Whether single or married, old or young, they come for one reason, Hamill said: connection, complete with bad breath, awkward laughs, wine spills and smoke breaks. "We sit and talk our heads off, is how I always put it," said Hamill, a 52-year-old attorney with the Office of the State Appellate Defender in Elgin. "I'm really glad people like to do this. It makes me feel better about humankind, that most are willing to drive an hour to be here." Wanted: ConnectionSkip the reality shows. Spare him Internet chat rooms. Terry Poulos prefers to see the whites of someone's eyes when he talks. He'd rather fire off an immediate verbal rejoinder than spend 30 seconds typing on a white screen. Talking, thinking and then talking more, the 38-year-old Arlington Heights man says, is what life is all about. "It's everything you read, watch on TV, everything that's you. Conversation merely allows that to come out," said Poulos, an occasional visitor to the Elgin salon. "Reality is when people get together in groups like these." Others agree. Conversation cafes and salons percolate across the Chicago area and country, says Vicki Robin, founder of the conversation cafe concept that debuted in Seattle three years ago. "Candid, thoughtful inquisitive conversation is really quite rare. I think there's a basic hunger for that," Robin said. "It's free, but we can't even think about that anymore. We have to go to the movies." Yet a Saturday night at the movies feeds the isolation that haunts many people, said sociologist Bernard Beck, a professor at Evanston-based Northwestern University. Amid the frenetic pace of life that renders family dinners increasingly rare, Beck said, "you often hear people say, 'my life is just . . . ' " Whatever it is, it's not often enough. "We're constantly on the lookout to create a circle of connections to convince us we're living a full life," Beck said. "When we form a picture of what would be a good life, in it there's a certain level of conversation." And the best conversation, Beck and Robin claim, comes in person. "For a dialogue that deepens your understanding of the world, deepens your understanding of your place in the world, you absolutely need to be able to smell people's armpits, see their faces," Robin said. "That connection softens your understanding of the world." Structuring salonsKathy Hamill learned an important lesson from her days pursuing many an activist cause in the 1960s and 1970s: Every group needs a dictator. A benign one, mind you. The Carpentersville native stepped into the role six years ago, when she and her partner, Slater, launched their homespun conversation salon. Hamill decided then she'd pick topics, steering clear of current events and instead waxing philosophical with issues such as truth and illusion, perceptions of time, the ideal social gathering, psychic sciences, political potency and God. What better way to stoke the intellectual fires and attract a blend of people? "We like unusual personalities," Hamill said. "We decided to ferret them out on our own." A missive in Chicago newspapers for "suburban unconventional thinkers starving for imaginative, intelligent conversation" did the trick, drawing 20 suburbanites to Hamill and Slater's inaugural salon in 1998. Steve Veeneman was one of the salon's first devotees. He attends regularly. "This is my equivalent of going to church," said Veeneman, a Genoa man who met the Elgin couple at a dream workshop. "I actually value what I think, what I have to share with people. It's a sense of mission." To share and receive, to listen and be listened to, is the mission of any conversation group, whether the sparks fly in Hamill and Slater's living room or the cafe in Crystal Lake's Borders. There, members of Woodstock's Congregational Unitarian Church and Congregation Tikkun Olam host a conversation forum that launched eight years ago. The forum is fashioned in the style of salons made famous by Gertrude Stein in Paris during the 1920s. Organizer Gerry Berendt, a professor at John Marshall Law School, said: "Any opinion is welcome. Our only ground rule is tolerance for other views, civility." Slater expects the same of participants in the Elgin salon. "There are no rules and people obey them very well," 61-year-old Slater said. "There's a context here of civility and respect, and people obey that." Conversation rarely devolves into antagonism, Hamill adds. Should it grow heated, a conveniently planned hiatus around 8:30 p.m. cools the mood. Nicotine addicts head outside for relief. Others pour a glass of wine or mango juice and continue chatting. "There's a camaraderie here," said Daniel Grubb, a 41-year-old professor at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. "In the chat rooms I've been to on the Internet, I don't get to know people the same way. I prefer this." Digital dialogueA junior at St. Charles East High School, Adrien Aaron cruises the Internet with ease. He e-mails; he instant messages; he chats - online. But the St. Charles teen left the Web behind and skipped a Saturday night with his friends to join his mother for a night of conversation with people twice his age or older. "This isn't like a chat room at all," Aaron said. "Here you actually get into depth, discuss real points. When you're in chat rooms, you don't get that in-depth." Terry Hall, a generation and a technological world apart from Aaron, agrees. Sure, she can log into chat rooms or cruise Web sites to discuss the simplicity movement or historic accuracy. But that doesn't cut it for Hall. "On the Internet, everybody is invisible and anonymous. Here we do have responsibility for what we say," Hall said. "The face-to-face keeps it real." Yet the message-to-message keeps it going, others contend, saying Web-based chat rooms stem from the same need for engagement that attracts people to salons. Technology, if nothing else, primes the conversation pump, cafe maven Vicki Robin said. Web sites and e-mail listserves accelerate dialogue by allowing word to spread beyond the reach of a telephone tree. The Elgin salon sends an invitation each month to more than 100 people. But Hamill and Slater don't just rely on snail mail; they've got a Web site - www.elginsalon.org - and an e-mail address. As for where all this talk will lead - on the Web and in living rooms, in Elgin and across the country - the hope is to ease exchanges with strangers at the bus stop. "People need to realize it's safe to reveal yourself, safe to open to other people's ideas," Robin said. "Without that, you don't have a democracy." |
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